


Riches and Wonders

by dimtraces



Series: Runaways 'verse [5]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: (maladaptive) coping mechanisms, (the warnings are for different scenes btw), Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Sith Code, also a chronicle of Savage’s doomed struggle to get Maul to eat Real Food™, culture clash, essentially 14k of Maul And Savage Love Each Other tbh, learned helplessness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-08
Updated: 2017-08-08
Packaged: 2018-12-12 22:25:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11746425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dimtraces/pseuds/dimtraces
Summary: Almost two years after the rescue and/or kidnapping, Savage and Maul have settled into their new routine. They survive disastrous hit jobs, medcenters, holidays and worse, both despite and because of the lessons they were taught.





	Riches and Wonders

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: Maul’s leg is shot to pieces by a slugthrower bullet, hence the Graphic Depictions of Violence tag. They go to a hospital with dubious ethics. There’s also a few murders, and references to past child abuse and magical brainwashing.
> 
> Regarding the Rape tag: A woman approaches Savage in a bar and ignores his timid objections, and she sleeps with him. It’s not very graphic, because Savage uses his memories to soothe himself, but it is from his POV. A good portion of the rest of the fic deals with the aftermath, the nightsisters’ use of the nightbrothers for breeding and his attempts to rationalize it, too. For more detailed info and which parts to skip if you want to do that, go to the End Notes or shoot me an ask @ doorsclosingslowly.tumblr.com

_(It was an old family ritual, he believed, although he’d never met any generation that came before him apart from his big brother, and Carve was long gone by now. He never found out where it came from, or cared that he didn’t. Once a year or near-as, the table was piled high with dried meats and biltong and sweetbreads, on the day after Brother Viscus came down from the city to announce a visit by the Sisters. After all, he might have to be strong the next day, well-rested and well-fed. It was a ritual, or as close as can be, when one half of its participants doesn’t know what it is for, yet, or does—how could he remain ignorant when there was nothing else the children talked about—or does, and stays silent out of pity, and the other refuses to explain._

_It was a ritual, when he went to bed with a fat aching belly and his small sleeping brother clutched like a ragdoll against his chest._

_It was nothing but bare selfishness, Savage decided two days after, unfavored by the Sisters and breathing and ashamed. The larder gaped in accusation, and Feral was hungry again. Would be hungry for days. The table was barely half-covered with scavenged earthworms in the week before the village felt up to hunting again, and even then, choice cuts had to be diverted to fill up the storage. It achieved nothing._

_There was no reason why throwing a feast with their emergency reserves had been a good idea. If it had turned out to be the last day that he was alive to see his brother’s smile, then surely, he should have left Feral something more than empty shelves._

_He decided he was selfish every year again, and then it didn’t matter anymore.)_

+

“There are so many,” Savage says, fiddling with the shiny new saberstaff he’s balanced carefully on his knees. He’s grinning in excited wonder, and when he tugs down his cowl to better appreciate the sight, it only snags one of his horns. Maybe he won’t even have to patch the hood again tonight. The cloak is annoying and strange in the way most of the things are that Maul insists they do, but by now he admits it might, occasionally, be useful. The black fabric does probably keep them hidden, crouched in a shadowed spot up on the roof of SonoMax Station, one of the confusingly many short-range train stations in Bonadan Spaceport Southeast II.

Savage stretches out a friendly hand towards a blue-scaled pidge.

The winged lizard putters close, fearlessly, its beady eyes trained on his fingers. Then it veers off, back to the rest of its flock. The lack of treats in Savage’s hand must have made it lose interest. He wonders idly whether Maul’s got a disgusting protein bar somewhere in his pockets, and more importantly, since he definitely does—how to ask for it without making Maul suspicious.

There’s no hope of pulling that off, Savage decides, so he just watches the pidges and repeats his ploy for conversation. “So many. No-one here will ever go hungry.”

“No,” Maul replies. He doesn’t look up, eyes focused on the commuters that swarm below. Savage doesn’t know who he’s looking for, but he trusts Maul. Whoever it is they were hired to kidnap, Maul will recognize them.

“No-one eats pidges. They’re filthy vermin, look at them.” Maul gestures at the flock without glancing away from the crowd down on the platform. “Puffed scales. Huddled atop each other. They’re cold, mutilated and hungry, and they’ve probably consumed enough lead to kill a trandoshan. They’re worse than your cooking.”

“They look friendly.”

“They are.” There’s a mocking twist in Maul’s brow. “They haven’t shaken off their instincts. Friendliness is bred into them. I read that they used to be pets, domesticated millennia ago. They aren’t native to Bonadan—nothing that still lives is—but they were brought to this planet and myriad others, so that they could be useful.”

Savage smiles to himself. He got what he wanted, and he enjoys it, even though he suspects that for Maul, these conversations are mostly a way of showing off that he knows more than Savage. It’s true, anyway, and only half-tragic: Maul told him before that he read as a child, so that he’d be meticulously prepared for every conceivable mission his Master would send him on. He never said that he was lonely. (He didn’t need to. “ _What’s the singular form of nightbrothers?_ Miserable _,”_ _Brother_ _Stinger used to mumble to himself, and laugh_.)

“Eventually, sentients grew bored with them, or they realized the inefficiency of using an animal to deliver bulletins, and they abandoned their sculpted brunner pouters and fantails and their trained homing blue-scales to the streets. Now, they aren’t even good enough to eat. They—

“There he is.”

Maul doesn’t make a sound as he runs along the edges of the roof or when he jumps down onto the deserted platform their mark is in the process of wandering down. He doesn’t glance back to ascertain whether Savage’s following, but then again, he’d probably say he doesn’t need to, and imply that Savage’s footsteps are heavier than a bantha’s. Which they aren’t. Hopefully. He’s still trying out those feet. (When Savage stalks after veeka-birds in the dim afternoons of his memory, he is gracefully silent. Maybe it’s another thing the Mother’s ritual took. Maybe that’s just what he wants to believe.)

It’s very easy, in the end: Savage jumps down first, at Maul’s hand-signal, and when the heavy-set human in his frayed suit looks up at Savage’s face, he turns right and runs faster. He runs until he reaches the edge of the platform, and then he whirls around, but there’s nowhere for him to go but the wall three paces behind him or the jump over the edge. The drop below is steep. There’s nothing but clumped rags dotting the platform, not even a streetlight.

“What do you want?!” the human shrieks. His hands jump up, as if he could shield himself with them, and then they press against his coat.

It’s unnecessary to talk, and so Savage doesn’t.

“No, please—I have a family, I can pay,” the man begs. “Please, mercy!”

Savage shakes his head. _Does he think he is special?_ _They all have a family. It’s never made anyone stop hurting them._ He bares his teeth and walks closer, though not close enough to really tower over him, the way he seems to tower over everyone these days. The man squeaks, and Savage smiles. He has no eyes for anything but Savage, now. He’ll never notice Maul. The plan is working.

“What do you want? I don’t have much money on me, but I’ll give you—please don’t eat me…”

Maybe it’s working too well. _A sentient-eater?_ Savage didn’t do anything but look at him. If this is what people think when they see him, it’s no wonder that it was so difficult to talk to anyone for the nigh-on two years he travelled the galaxy on his own. Finally, there’s a reason for all this loneliness. Not that it matters much anymore, now that his brother is with him, and he quickly banishes the thought. Maul will be angry if he gets distracted.

He’s about to stomp even closer, watching the man back away steadily, when his target stumbles over a pile of rags.

“Kriff off, sleemo,” the pile squeaks. A hiitian chick pokes her beak out of the dirty fabric, sleep-muddled and unsuccessfully trying to hide how much she’s trembling. “Puke out your alcohol-soaked guts somewhere else. Go make your own roost where I can’t sodding see it!”

A tiss’shar crawls out of the apparent sleeping berth next, baring her teeth and whipping her scaly tail in agitation.

Both of them are very dirty and very, very small.

 _They shouldn’t_ be _here_ , Savage thinks. They shouldn’t have to see what him and Maul are about to do. Being starved and homeless and abandoned by their family on Bonadan’s busy streets is horrific enough. Neither child looks a day over twelve. They should still be at home and cared for, the way they’d be cared for on Dathomir, where young boys who lose their brother just move into the next hut. They shouldn’t have no-one but each other. They don’t need to witness this.

“Leave this place, young ones. We mean you no harm,” Savage says, crouching slightly to get closer to their eye-level, and when he looks up again, the human has opened his dingy coat and pulled out a lean, primitive, solid projectile slugthrower.

He cocks it, faster than Savage can react.

He fires the gun.

Something hits Savage, but it isn’t pain. It’s not a bullet, it’s much bigger, and it barrels him over to the floor and sprays his belly with warm sticky fluid and fleshy shrapnel. It lies on top of him. It has arms.

It whimpers.

Maul _._

_Maul._

Savage’s eyes are shut tight from bright light and shock, and he doesn’t know what to do.

Hot air puffs against his neck.

The powder and blood-scent still burn his nostrils, and he feels nothing but the staccato of humid air. His head pounds, and his ears still ring from the close-range explosion, but he feels the gasps and sobs and he imagines the loud sound of his brother breathing, and its steady pain-tinged reassurance is the only reason he manages to start moving again.

_Maul is alive._

_He’s injured, somewhere—_ he saved Savage; he jumped into the path of the bullet that would have torn a hole in his guts and how _dare_ he put himself in danger _—but he’s alive._

Savage runs his frantic shaking hands down Maul’s back.

(He doesn’t look around to make sure that the human and the two children have run away. Why would anyone else matter, when Maul is in danger?)

When he doesn’t find any wounds there, he sits up and gently pulls his brother into his lap. Not gently enough: Maul wails and flinches and shakes; he bites and begs out slurred words, no matter how careful Savage tries to be. He should’ve done better, or maybe he never had a chance to avoid hurting his brother even more.

He checks the extremities, touches the arms and the left leg and the pulpy mess that should have been another thigh, and he’s utterly grateful that Brother Dudgeon got his leg crushed in a rockslide five years ago.

He knows how to help. There’s no more time left for thinking, so he acts.

“What are you doing?!” Maul gasps.

It takes Savage several moments to understand what Maul is referring to. He almost blurts out that he’s trying to apply a tourniquet, and his hands are slipping in the bleeding mess that used to be his brother’s right leg, but that should be _obvious_. Maul is badly hurt, but he’s lucid again now and he didn’t hit his head—he should be able to understand, he should…

Finally, on the edge of further panic, Savage notices that his own lips are moving. Unwittingly, he’s lurched into the ancient rhythms he has used to calm two babies, and that were used to calm him.

It makes more sense as a question than the first thing, and so he explains, “This is an old cradle-song. I sang it for—”

He’s guessed wrong.

“I don’t know it,” Maul snarls.

“I know, brother,” Savage mumbles, attempting to salvage the moment. To head off the anger. Maul isn’t well enough to fight. Savage’s hands are still moving and slipping through the torn fibers that are what’s left of the muscles of his brother’s thigh, although they’ve found purchase among the blood now and he’s pulling the belt tight. It takes up all his focus, and so the words pour out aimlessly, “I know. I wasn’t—I forget sometimes. We are together now, and it’s right, it’s so… And then you look at me, all confused. And I remember. I remember a sadist bought my baby brother and it took me twenty years to get him back.”

The words pour out until Maul loses his patience, or simply gets his breath back.

“This is futile,” he gasps, although Savage’s as sure as he can be that the tourniquet will keep him alive, “I need—I need _more_ …”

Whatever it is that Maul wanted, when he’s talked Savage through picking up his lightsaber and cauterizing the wound, his eyes roll up into his head and he’s too unconscious to tell him more.

Whatever it is he wanted, he probably didn’t get it.

+

Savage will never know how long he staggers through bustling streets, singing tonelessly and blood-drenched and with his unconscious brother cradled and breathing softly into his chest. If you told him it’s three minutes, he wouldn’t believe you. The scratches and gouges, he’ll notice later, but he’ll never connect them to Maul’s horns.

He’ll be ignorant of the faces of the passers-by who pull him into the emergency room of Zaltin General Medcenter, or that he bites one of them in the process when the woman dares accidentally touch Maul. He won’t—can’t—be grateful that they help, regardless.

He won’t remember the queue or the sign-in desk, or the nurse there glancing up, muttering, “Yet ’nother kriffing work-place injury. No bleeding,” and pointing at the waiting room. The amount of credits he offers as a bribe will remain forever a mystery, as will the pitying laughter when the reception nurse counts the money. Neither will Savage know there are guards when he punches and dents the desk in his desperation to get help _now_ , or that he quickly acquiesces and doesn’t reach for a lightsaber under her withering glare, or that he decides it is because he wouldn’t have been able to fight and hold Maul at the same time. (He will know he didn’t _have_ a lightsaber. He forgot both of their saberstaffs at the train station. Maul will never let that go.)

After five more minutes in a groaning waiting-room chair—another fact beyond Savage’s mind—a tiny feather-headed omwati nurse walks up to him.

“We apologize for the wait. I’m Junior Nurse On Pranxoh. I’m here with your intake form,” she drones. Then, again, “Nurse Pranxoh, with your intake form,” waving her hand in front of Savage’s face while he stares at nothing.

“Sorry?” Savage says. He stops the helpless bouncing of his leg. The hand he’s been using to steady Maul’s head and gently rub the bases of his horns tenses reflexively, and he hides his brother’s passed-out face in the bend of his shoulder.

She scowls. “Pranxoh. With questions. How old is the injury? When did he get pulled into the machine?”

“I don’t—”

“Roughly? No? Next question. Your friend’s leg, what’s left of it, smells cooked. Very lucky for you, the cauterization, he couldn’t bleed out, but—how? What kind of machine was it? Where do you work?”

“I—what… please help—”

Savage looks at her, and she considers him, and for a moment her stern gaunt face morphs into another Woman’s— _“Look at him, Sisters. He is ready,” and when the Mother touches him in delight and cruelty it has everything to do with Her pleasure at Her own might, and nothing with him_ —and he flinches. The image is quickly forced back inside, by the nurse’s curt professionalism, her obvious personal indifference, and the sting of Maul’s claws still clutched too tightly in Savage’s right hand.

“This is pointless,” Pranxoh decides, and reaches for Maul. “Don’t growl at me. I am _helping_ ,” she snaps at Savage, and then she administers a stim-shot into the bend of Maul's arm. “Okay, next try. Do not be alarmed, you have woken up in a medcenter and will be treated soon. This is Junior Nurse On Pranxoh of Zaltin General Medcenter, asking—”

Maul barely manages to flutter his eyelids at first and his mouth is sluggish, but that doesn’t dim his fury. “You... brought us _where_... apprentice?”

“Brother. You were _hurt_ , and I didn’t—”

“We’re leaving.” Maul attempts to leverage himself up, wrapping an arm around Savage’s neck and bracing the other on his shoulder. The stump of his right leg pushes against Savage, burning hot and accusing. Maul whimpers. Apart from that, nothing much happens: just minute trembles growing stronger.

He drops back into Savage’s lap, growling in obvious frustration.

“Ah, you’re one of _those_ …” Pranxoh rolls her eyes. She only looks at Maul, now. Savage is grateful to have lost the remainder of her interest, but—this is about his brother, his brother who needs care that he doesn’t want and who doesn’t believe in going to doctors and who could die, and so he cannot shrink away completely.

“Don’t be stupid. You’re in medcenter for a reason. Even if you believe you cannot afford Zaltin General’s fees, we have an excellent payment plan and—”

“It doesn’t matter, because the galaxy is big and nobody will find us,” Savage says.

Maul groans.

“That, too,” Pranxoh replies. She almost grins. Then, with a spindly blue finger poised above the keys of her medcenter datapad, “What are you, anyway?”

“Nightbrothers,” Savage says.

At the same time, Maul forces through his gritted teeth, “Zabrak.”

Nurse Pranxoh barely twitches a single busy eyebrow while she types. “Good.” When the pad vibrates at whatever she has chosen to type in, she studies its screen for a second, and then she adds, “Exotic. Haven't seen anything like you around here yet. Seems like the shipyards are growing ever more desperate for new sentient vic—workers. Allergies?”

 _What?_ Savage frowns.

“I am capable of surviving anything.”

The nurse mutters something derogatory under her breath. Then, louder, “I’ll just have you tested then. Going to cost extra.”

She’s similarly dismayed by their answers regarding insurance _(“What?”)_ , date of birth _(“I don’t—he was already a few weeks old when he was given to me,” Savage mumbles, hunching his shoulders when he realizes her judging face at what, apparently, ought to be easy knowledge.)_ , family history _(“He’s my brother! What does that have to do with genes? How would I know who his father is?”)_ , past injuries and illnesses _(“Several,” Maul says, and Savage carefully doesn’t run his fingers over the bumpy scarred landscape of his arm.)_ , and what led to Maul’s leg getting torn off.

Eventually, her pad beeps, and she stops asking.                                                                                        

“Medcenter policy. Sorry. Everything’s streamlined, and your maximum intake minutes are up. I’ll send your brother back to reception for contact information, and you’ll get onto this gurney,” the gurney another nurse drops off right then as if it was choreographed.

She doesn’t give Maul time to protest, just jabs him with a needle of fast-acting anesthetic he’s too weak to dodge.

Then, she directs Savage to heave his limp body onto the stretcher.

“You’re not allowed in the operating room,” she declares when Savage doesn’t let go of Maul’s hand. “Don’t try it, or you’ll get tossed out, both of you. Sorry. Policy.

“Oh. Almost forgot.” Nurse Pranxoh stops Maul’s gurney in the middle of the doorway. She digs around in its bottom tray, cursing when the gurney rolls away slightly, pushed by the heavy door. It comes to a halt wedged against the doorframe, and she finds what she’s looking for: another datapad, this time with a writescreen and a stylus.

“Consent form.”

She thumbs it on and holds it out to Savage.

He’s barely deciphered the first paragraph when she takes it back, impatient. She scrolls through it, muttering, “Zaltin General won’t be held liable if complications arise… In case of non-payment… Tracking device in prosthetic—lucky you, those legs cost a fraction of a fuel-hour to make, there’s no point in chasing you down if you’re planning on running off-planet… Automatic organ don… Zaltin Corp owns everything but your future offspring… Ah, there it is. Sign here.”

Savage only prints out three letters of his name, painstakingly round and inexpert, before he realizes he should use a codename. He hopes Maul would be proud.

+

_(The medcenter will release Maul only a few minutes after his prosthesis is affixed, before the anesthetic has even fully worn off, with a stern warning not to strain anything and to pay all bills._

_That evening, already parsecs from Bonadan, Savage will tell Maul every detail of what he was unconscious for, everything he knows and some things he doesn’t: he wasn’t allowed into the operating theatre after all, so he just makes things up. It’s for the best. Maul doesn’t do well with missing time._

_But Savage will remember the years until he found Maul, and forget to mention the tracking device.)_

+

_(When the Jedi comes four weeks later to collect the lightsabers found at the train station and investigate and follow the rumors of two force-strong assassins to the medcenter, he will spend more than two futile days with members of the staff._

_He won’t get around to questioning junior nurse On Pranxoh before he gets recalled to the next sighting._

_It wouldn’t have helped him, anyway: Pranxoh will already have forgotten about Maul and Savage by then. Hysterical relatives are a half-cred a dozen in her line of work, and she’ll have lives to save and groceries to buy in her scarce off-hours. And most importantly, she’ll have friends to contact across medcenters in the other nine spaceports, secretly. She’ll have fellow nurses and doctors and janitors to rile up, for the strike she’ll organize, the strike that will earn her eight-hundred-and-thirty days of infamy, three spiked batons to the face, and the first pay rise that medcenter workers on Bonadan have received in fifty-nine years.)_

+

It’s luck: Maul doesn’t fall backwards when he slips this time. His hands hit the ground, and the knees follow with a harsh crack and a scrape in the floor from the sturdy metal prosthesis, but this time, at least, there can’t be a concussion. Savage won’t be any more successful in convincing his brother to accept salves and ice compresses for it, he knows, but there’s no added fear. This injury will only bring pain, and not the wrenching danger of loss.

By now, Savage has learned the language of his brother’s movements by heart, and he knows that this was supposed to be just a simple turn. Maul was just going to wheel around with flying tunics and his young grin, but he chose to stand on his metal leg, the way that wouldn’t have mattered a few days ago, and he didn’t feel the oil puddle on the hangar floor.

It’s not the first time the leg has felled him today, or even the tenth.

Savage leans against the doorframe, gingerly rubbing the fading bruises on his belly that should have been much worse and the scratches, bites and burns that dot his arms. He watches his crouching brother quietly, and waits for the urge to help him up—to make him stop hurting himself, to praise him for his persistence, to _apologize_ —he waits for the itch to pass. It’s not Maul’s rage that stops him, although Savage knows would be courting ire if he let Maul know of the witness to what must seem like his humiliation. The anger and the attack that would follow—that _did_ follow, when he foolishly tried to help two days ago—it would hurt him, but that doesn’t matter.

He wouldn’t let that stop him, if it weren’t for the flinch. The stink of fear when he stood over his fallen brother. The head, lowered again.

The whispered “Master, I—” and the way that Maul didn’t tremble.

Maul slips, and he gets up again.

+

They separate during a simple hit job on a rich Fondorian, and that’s when it begins. Savage is worried sick, and also helplessly proud that Maul’s deemed his apprenticeship advanced enough, now, to be sent off alone—that Savage hasn’t completely lost his trust after the screw-up. His job is to smash up the man’s home office. It’s fun. There are no pieces larger than his pinkie finger left when he is done.

Maul, obviously, takes the more important part of the job. He climbs the uppermost floor, to slice the Fondorian’s head off and bring it back, as their client wants.

It isn’t the only thing he brings back.

When he climbs down the stairs, sweaty and elated and limping badly from a torn low-quality connector in his prosthetic leg, he’s also dragging an old protocol droid behind him. Replacement parts for his leg, Savage assumes, but Maul says something about the Sheathipede being due another upgrade, and then mumbles something else that Savage can’t quite make out. It doesn’t matter anyway, the soft look that Maul aims at the droid clinches it: Savage would never protest this new project, no matter what it is.

Not even when it turns out to be a protocol droid head wired into their ship’s navcomputer. A droid with a woman’s voice, high and cutting, and Savage doesn’t like going into the cockpit anymore. Cutlass I is scary.

Cutlass II is much nicer, no matter how often Maul says that they’re actually both just interfaces for the same new ship AI. He’s disassembled, his head and arms salvaged and wired into the walls of the sleeping room, an ingenious combination of new friend, easy-access second terminal for the flight system, and additional security measure. (Maul spends three weeks turning every finger into a miniature blaster.)

Savage quickly realizes that he likes talking to Cutlass II a lot. Too much, possibly. He spends hours asking him about recipes and planetary histories that he would have gotten very bored just reading about. It’s great to have someone else around: Maul gets quiet sometimes, and Savage has grown up in a close-knit village, and raised a child. He is a man of few stumbling words, but he never managed to get used to the silence, not even during the lonely two years he was looking for his brother.

Two weeks later, Gorge shows up. He isn’t called Gorge yet, he’s just another head, this time attached at Savage’s eye level in what used to be a kitchen cupboard.

When Savage comes back from shopping that day, Maul practically pulls him inside and snarls, “Here. Now you can leave the sleep-room. Don’t ever tell Second Cutlass to read out the entire content of his memory chips again just because you enjoy background noise. Stop interrupting my katas incessantly,” and then he runs off and it takes Savage half an hour to find him again and say, “Thank you.”

Gorge’s called Gorge now because there’s something wrong with the voicebox, and he stutters sometimes, like a boy Savage knew back at the village. (Savage doesn’t let Maul near him, for fear he might fix the defect.)

“—fish are considered a delicacy on-on-on-on-on…”

“Just try again when you get stuck,” Savage interrupts. “And wind back a minute or two, I wasn’t paying attention.”

“Talasea is a near-deserted planet in the Morobe system, orbiting the yellow primary star of its red and yellow binary group. It was—”

“That sounds good, right?”

“Of course it sounds good to you. You asked me for ways to cheer Maul up and interrupt his obsessive post-injury training, did you not? And then you asked for pleasant deserted planets with sufficient wildlife. I have to say, this plan of-of yours is not—”

“You’ve told me that already. Promise you won’t tell Maul?” Savage whispers.

“Technically, Master Maul will be able to retrieve every interaction fro-fro-from my databases,” Gorge starts to lecture. If he still had hands, he’d be primly resting them on his—now also non-existent—hips right now, Savage imagines. And then he’d be using his non-existent legs to walk over to Cutlass I in the cockpit or Cutlass II in the sleeping room, and whisper to them about how Savage’s a bit dim, seriously, why doesn’t he _get_ it, this is the third time this week. He’d probably also gang up with Maul and tell Savage that they’re the same AI with a different head, and that they don’t even need to _talk_.

Savage grins. It’s almost like home.

_(Maul is always grouchy when he explains something again and again, but it doesn’t stop him. It’s never stopped anyone, in Savage’s experience. If you can get someone to feel that you need to be taught, they will talk at you for a while and you won’t have to admit that you felt lonely. Everybody likes explaining things.)_

“Your best chance of hiding your ill-conceived plan would be to manually overwrite all my databases with null characters several times. However, given your general technical aptitude, I would counsel against—”

“Gorge? Please?”

The droid head sighs. “Yes, Savage, I won’t tell him.”

+

“You will never plan anything again for the rest of your miserable life, apprentice. Which incidentally might prove to be quite short.” Maul scowls. It's just a tiny shift—he’s squinting his eyes against the glare of the midday sun, as well—and if anything, it makes him look more adorable.

Savage adjusts the strap of his backpack to keep from grinning at him.

It doesn’t work, and only makes Maul even angrier. “Are you certain that you failed to bring a map?” he hisses. “We’re lost. We’ve passed that boulder for the third time now.”

They haven’t. They’ve been navigating by the sun from the second they left the shuttle, the way Savage was taught when he was just a toddler and that has never failed him. He has memorized the scenic route. They’re exactly on course.

But if Maul found out now, he might decide to go back to the ship.

He might ruin all of Savage’s careful planning.

“I highly doubt that the nation of Mon Cala are on a crusade to save their non-sentient brethren, so how is it possible for someone who lives in a field in the deserted backyard of Quellor, doing _force knows what_ to _fish,_ to even _make enemies_? Enemies dedicated enough to hire hit men from parsecs away to vandalize his _house_? This is a trap.”

It’s not a trap. It’s not even a paying job, or _real_ , technically speaking, and Savage is forced to admit that when spelled out like that, the story’s not particularly _good_.

He focuses on the one part he thinks he can salvage. “Vandalize his roe farm, brother.”

Maul raises a skeptical eyebrow.

“Fish eggs are a delicacy, and very expensive. I ferried around a lot of roe shipments before I found you. They’re tasty. Even humans eat them,” Savage insists. It shouldn’t matter—it _hurts_ that it matters—but it’s partially why he brought them here. It’s the only argument he knows that has a chance of making Maul try actual _food_ instead of his ridiculous protein bars, now that Maul’s realized that he can just order Savage to buy them for him. (That argument works, and tying him up. Where did he stow the Mother’s force-suppressant rope, again?)

“Besides—you trained me well, brother. I shall not freeze up again. I promise. If it is a trap, we can take them. Are you scared?”

“I’m never scared. For the rest of the galaxy, I _am_ fear,” Maul says reflexively, baring his teeth and puffing up his chest. The intimidation factor is slightly hampered by the fact that he’s not wearing his massive black cloak but just a muscle shirt, Savage decides silently. Also, he’s still Savage’s little brother.

“So there is no reason _not to_ vandalize the farm.”

Maul pulls a grumpy face. Then, he smiles. “You anticipated that reply. Well played, apprentice. Provided that we actually find it.”

They do, just minutes later.

Old M’lee’s farm—just as foolishly advertised on a virtual flyer that Gorge had found—is a fenced-off section of the slow wide Mala river. Wooden trellises, reaching meters above the waterline and stretching from shore to shore to keep the fish in. A small house, which is presumably where M’lee lives when he’s not tending to his fish, or butchering them for eggs. All around them, just wide empty meadows and clear sunshine and the soft plops of captive serm fish, leaping into the air and falling back into their cage.

It’s just as perfect for a holiday as Savage was picturing.

“This should be easy enough,” Maul declares, narrowing his eyes at the trellises. “A single pressure bomb attached to the bottom of the downstream grate.”

“Or—we could just catch the fish,” Savage says hopefully.

“Apprentice. This is foolish. The bomb would be considerably faster—”

“We don’t need speed. The fish are penned in, they can’t swim away.” Savage almost feels sorry for them.

Maul sighs. “You didn’t bring the pressure bomb either, did you. I only said yes and interrupted my training because I wanted to test my design, and I rushed the building process so I’d be ready, and you didn’t bring it.”

“I’m sorry, brother.” Savage tries very hard to look ashamed, and keep up the pretense.

“You didn’t bring a map. You packed no food or explosives,” Maul repeats slowly. “Or anything else for this supposed ‘job’. But your backpack is bulky, there’s _something_ inside. Put it down. Now. Open it.”

Carefully, Savage pulls out a couple of blankets, one of which he smooths out on the grass, and on that he puts a box of biomech tools, a jar of home-made grill sauce, and Maul’s emergency backup leg prosthetic.

He really should have seen the danger in Maul’s expression.

He should have run, instead of standing there dumbly when Maul launches himself at Savage and wrestles him into a choke-hold. Running would have been wiser, probably, but Savage just lets his instincts take over, and within seconds, he’s pinned face-down to the ground and breathing in grass. (His instincts, after all, were honed in many play-fighting matches with pre-teen Feral. He has never not lost.)

“What is this,” Maul hisses. He drives his knee deeper into the spot between Savage’s shoulder blades and twists his left arm upwards. “What is this deception? There was no client, was there? You _lured_ me here, but why… what is…”

His voice grows firmer again when he’s found an explanation that makes sense. There’s a hum besides Savage’s ear, and heat: Maul’s ignited his lightsaber. “Apprentice, you are _not ready_ to fight me.”

“Fight?!” Savage is so indignant he forgets his big brother rules and how strong his new body is. He forgets the blade next to his head. He stands up, easily dislodging Maul from his perch on Savage’s back and catching an accidental glancing blow against his upper arm, and then he turns around and looks down at Maul. “Brother, I would never—”

Maul gets up quickly. He raises his saber again, but it wavers. “You wouldn’t. You… you wouldn’t have brought a leg for that. Why did you…?”

“You claim your new leg is waterproof, but I wasn’t sure,” Savage admits. “I didn’t want anything to go wrong.”

Maul looks incredulous. “You brought me here to _swim_.”

“I brought you here to have fun,” Savage says firmly. “It’s safe. There’s no danger here. No people. Just a river, and some fish to eat. Ever since Bonadan, you’ve been frantic—”

“I need to train. The mission was an abject failure. I miscalculated the bullet speed and mistimed my jump—I made an _amateur_ mistake, and was mutilated for it.”

“You’re too hard on yourself, and I understand, but… You saved me. It was not _your_ failure, and it’s wrong that you feel bad about that, I hate… You’re my little brother, and you were never allowed to grow up. You were never allowed to be a child. I just wanted to do something nice for you, because you were alone, you were never allowed to play or swim or—”

“I know how to swim. I told you about the prison Lord Sidious sent me to, so that I might contact the arms dealer Iram Radique. Cog Hive Seven. They flooded my cell once—if I couldn’t swim I wouldn’t have survived…”

The story of Maul being held down and his hearts injected with bombs in the service of nothing but ancient plans and secrecy hasn’t grown any lighter with time.

“I’ll kill your Master for you, brother,” Savage growls.

“You cannot be serious. You wouldn’t _dare_. Lord Sidious will—” Whatever it is Maul finds in Savage’s expression, it makes him trail off.

For a second, he looks very young, the child that Savage wishes he could have raised.

Savage wishes he was angry. He wishes it was useful.

It isn’t, though, it won’t bring his child back, and so he just chases Maul into the shallow water and takes the moment and sorts it away, with the ignorance of songs, with the nightmares and touch-aversion and snake-quick anger, with the obsessive training, the self-blame after his injury and a vast hill of evidence of Maul’s childhood malnutrition, and with the laughter that is still to come.

He’ll remember it at night and think: Yes, an outsider raised his little brother, but he was awful. He never even knew what Maul needed. He never could have been as good for Maul as Savage is.

There was a pale man in a blood-cowl between them, once, but neither of them will ever want him back.

+

_(Maul won’t try roe today, after all. They’ll slit a few fish bellies, but Savage’s picked the wrong season, and none of them carry young. He will try a piece of raw fish in the end—after much cajoling, which Savage will figure he’s entitled to, after Maul left the shallow waters with his heavy prosthetic and pretended to drown, and then pulled his frantic brother under. Twice._

_Predictably, Maul will declare that raw fish is disgusting._

_He’ll still be complaining about the aftertaste when farmer M’lee makes the incredibly unwise and terminal decision to check on his fish in the evening.)_

+

_(M’lee’s daughter will inherit the roe farm. It will lie empty, and succumb to rot. She’ll never set another foot on Talasea, not after that horrifying morning when she comes back from a friend’s wedding to find her father missing and then dismembered and burned in the peaceful grass._

_She’ll die on Coruscant ten years later, destitute and still trying to bring justice.)_

+

Savage picks apart the pretty white flowers inside his cocktail glass, turning the petals into millimeter-long shreds that take him to the very edge of his shrinking dexterity. He doesn’t notice. When he’s run out, he destroys his paper napkin, and then he moves on to the red blossoms inside the glass that was Maul’s, a quarter-hour ago, mindlessly dipping his fingers into the remainder of sparkling liquid.

He should have been delighted at the carbon dioxide tickling his fingertips.

He should have noticed it, at least, another one of the strange luxuries that were unthinkable back home on Dathomir and that the galaxy never seems to tire of showing him, but equally, he shouldn’t even have had the opportunity to notice the sparkling. The red decorating flowers shouldn’t have been his to destroy.

Maul should have still been here.

Would have still been here, if Savage hadn’t gone and brought up the training, which has not stopped. The holiday idea has just not worked at all.

_(“It was a… traumatic event, brother,” he’d said half an hour ago, stumbling over the unfamiliar vocabulary that fills his nightly briefings from Gorge, now. There is a wealth of experience out here in the world—there are children like Maul everywhere, and people, clever people, who agree with Savage—there is a squirming pile of articles crammed into the memory cards he stole during a hit job on a mind-shrink. There must be something in them. Maul values knowledge, and nothing else has helped yet, so the droid keeps droning out footnotes every night and the long lists of names and book titles that follow every article, until Savage can’t keep his eyes open anymore._

_“Many people struggle with their self-worth after an amputation. After losing their leg. It’s important to tell them—I am telling you, it doesn’t make you less whole. It’s just a limb. You are my brother, just as you were before. I will not leave you over this. I will always lo—_ follow _you…”_

_Maul had been still. His eyes hadn’t even flickered away from the vidscreen showing podracing reruns._

_“There are many options, a technologist on Anoat is even experimenting with synthskin on prosthetics. Not for nightbroth—for_ zabraks _, yet, but we could persuade him. We could force him to help us. There doesn’t…”_

_Nothing._

_“You may not believe me. This is very common. Gorge keeps showing me all these wise people who say, ‘Many survivors of child abuse—’”_

_And that’s when Maul left.)_

He could have—no. He doesn’t want to think about this right now. It’s just going to make him feel bad. Helpless.

It was his fault, anyway. Why did he believe he could help? He shouldn’t have said anything in the first place, and if he keeps thinking about this now, it’s just going to make him want to go out and find Maul, and… Well, Savage’s never been particularly good at winning arguments. Better to wait until the fight’s forgotten and done with before he goes back to the Sheathipede.

That’s what worked when Feral grew into a teenager anyway, and that was when—he wasn’t too good at telling Feral that, and then it was utterly too late—that’s when he was the authority in their hut, the big brother tasked with making sure of their safety, and his word, within the confines of their walls, was law. Well, he still _is_ the big brother. But if Maul decides not to understand that, there’s really nothing Savage can do.

 _Feral_ had no way to kick him out of his home and leave him stranded parsecs away from Dathomir.

It’s better to wait until Maul’s temper has run out of things to consume.

He should distract himself, and so Savage orders another Alderaani spritzer.

And another.

In-between sips, he steals glances at the other bar patrons. Savage sighs. They all seem to be having a much better evening than he is.

One booth over, a trio of wookiees are huddling around a mountain of credits piled in the middle of their table, moaning softly into their sharply pungent steins. They’re having accarrgm, straight, Savage guesses. He shudders. It numbed his tongue for an entire hour when he was foolish enough to trust his new friend Socvumo and took a sip, and one diluted with blue milk, at that. The wookiees seem happy, though. They’re playing a dice game. An unfamiliar one. No matter how carefully he watches, Savage can’t quite make out who’s winning. Someone must be, though: the tallest wookiee is getting very agitated.

Maybe Maul would have recognized the game, if he’d been here. He would have taken one look and told Savage all the players’ tactical mistakes, and then he’d have taught the game to Savage. It would have been a good thing. The long flights are very boring, and there’s no reason to keep training all the time. No good reason. Maul is already stronger than anyone they’ve ever met—he would probably be able to look the Mother in the eye, although Savage’s trying very hard to keep that from ever happening.

Maul would look at Her, and She wouldn’t be able to force him to do _anything_.

Savage is startled out of the daydream when the tallest wookiee’s fork clatters to the floor. He watches the way he crouches down and then surreptitiously digs out a new, most likely weighted, die out of the matted fur at his wrist. The wookiee notices that Savage is looking, and winks.

Angry at himself for getting caught, Savage quickly moves on to the next table.

 _(Fifteen minutes later, the tall wookiee will roar his victory. He’ll grab the pile of credits and run out the back door. His companions’ bowcaster shots will take down the entire door and the small family of cereans sitting at the table next to it, but_ he _will make it.)_

In the corner, a bearded long-haired human is talking intently to his small buzz-cut child. They’re too far away to eavesdrop, sadly. They’re both armed: When the child is gesticulating, pointing his tiny hands vaguely in Savage’s direction, Savage can see a small cylinder tied to his belt. When the man takes hold of the flailing hand and pulls it downwards—he’s probably saying, “Don’t be rude, son, that scary alien is just another person,” Savage imagines—his brown coat shifts to uncover another hilt. From the distance, they look like miniature versions of the saberstaff Maul taught Savage how to make. Interesting.

If Maul hadn’t left an hour ago, he’d probably insist on secretly following them.

He would end up picking a fight, because he hasn’t been socialized right, has been raised in isolation from his brothers and never learned to meditate a playground dispute. The man and his son look nice. It’s probably good that Maul has left.

_(It’s the Jedi that will end up following Savage, in fact. Qui-Gon Jinn and his young, recently won Padawan Anakin will stalk the massive fearsome creature and suspected Sith lord that they have found, to the apartment building and the ship and beyond._

_Savage is wrong about the danger, and he is right: it will be their doom.)_

He moves on then, looking at the bar, where an old nikto is busy arguing with the barwoman, gesturing up towards the ceiling with ever more sweeping movements, and a rodian woman is picking up a cocktail glass. She notices him, too. Maybe Maul is right that Savage is lacking in stealth. She walks over to his table.

“An Alderaani Spritzer, the platonic ideal of a girls’ drink,” the rodian says, nodding at Savage’s glass.

“They are?” Savage glances around the room, panicked. _He can’t be_ allowed _—he…_ _Why didn’t the bartender tell him?_ No-one’s looking at him, luckily—maybe they haven’t noticed. Maybe they’ve been waiting until Maul’s gone to confront him.

He wraps his hand around the glass, tensed wide to hide as much as possible. He begins to slowly pull it towards the edge of the table, so that he can smash it and try to rid himself of the evidence.

“No, don’t,” the rodian says, wrapping her hand around his and holding it still. She’s so close now that Savage catches the discreet smell of flowers on her. After a moment, he remembers what the scent is: lilac flowers, pale purple bushes all over the hills while he knelt and held the amulet and begged his unseen brother to stop, just _stop_ , running away from him. She’s wearing perfume, another outside-world luxury. “It wasn’t a criticism. I like a man who’s secure enough in his masculinity, and admits they _do_ taste better than ale. Mind if I sit here? I’m Keeu.”

“Savage. And no.” Savage smiles at her, immeasurably grateful.

She sits down next to him, unwrapping her long green fingers from the half-empty glass of Coruscant Sunrise she puts down on the table and smoothing her dress, instead.

“I’m—” Savage tries.

She’s smiling at him, nodding as if to tell him, _go on_.

“The rules are so different out here.”

Keeu grins. “Superfluous, is what they are. Where are you from, anyway? You pulled quite a face when you said, ‘out here’.”

“Dathomir. All nightbrothers are from Dathomir. I think. I didn’t even know you _could_ leave, two years ago.”

“I’m jealous,” Keeu says. “I’ve never even set foot on Rodia. My parents never would have let me. Some old feud, my mother was never too forthcoming with the details. Dad, neither, except that he’s glad his parents left. I’ve probably got cousins there, and nieces that I’ll never meet. It must be good to have a connection like that, to your planet.”

“It’s miserable. I can never go back home.”

“Why not?”

“I—stole my brother. I was supposed to bring him back to the Mother, but I couldn’t let Her hurt him, and She’ll be angry.”

“That’s…” Keeu’s smile stutters, and comes back too brightly. She shifts, subtly, to the left, as if she’s trying to look past Savage. He wouldn’t have noticed it, before, but the worry has made him pay attention to every single one of Maul’s movements. He just doesn’t quite know what it means. Still, he shoves his chair back and ducks his head, to be less obtrusive. She smiles. “That sounds… _interesting_. Your brother?”

“He was here, too,” Savage says eagerly. “He’s very strong, but stubborn. I was trying to talk to him, about prosthetics and therapy. He lost his leg a few months ago in an—accident, and I’m worried about how well he is adjusting. I looked up people who could help us. It’s my purpose to take care of him. He was annoyed with me. He left half an hour ago.”

“Must be a dick, then. You’re trying hard, he doesn’t know what he’s missing. You’re great company.”

Savage wants to bristle at the insult to Maul, but he also misses easy conversation and _he_ never would have left his brother sitting alone anywhere. He’s feeling vindictive. He nods.

“I’m a slicer, by the way,” Keeu says. “White hat, though, obviously. Mostly contract work for governments, though I’ve also got contacts at the Corporate Alliance and you wouldn’t _believe_ the exploits they’ve accidentally left in their stuff. I found a bug that let me into their customer database two weeks ago.”

“Maul would believe it, probably. He likes programming droids.”

“Your brother? It’s not exactly droids, what I do, but yeah, probably. Never worked on mechanics myself, I sorta got into slicing because of an office job I did ages ago. Didn’t get the tools I needed, so I had to learn how to build them myself. Sink or swim, right? Liked the problem solving, and stayed. What do you do?”

“Cargo shipping,” Savage says. “Not going back home. Avoiding the people that want to drag us home. And fight training. Some fighting too, but it’s mostly training.”

“Good, honest work, huh? And fighting? Sounds like a story.”

“It’s fun. Usually. I’m taking a break, and my brother’s trying too hard right now.”

“I suppose you don’t need it anyway,” Keeu says. “Training. To seem strong. I mean, look at you!” She touches Savage’s bicep.

“People have told me I look intimidating,” Savage admits. Not Maul, though. He mostly says that Savage’s huge mass makes him an easy target for blasters, especially whenever Savage puts enough strength into a parry to throw him back across the training field.

“That’s… one word for it.” Keeu grins. “Not the one I’d use, though. I would just say you’re… _hot_.”

Savage blinks.

“You’ve felt it too, right?” Keeu runs a finger down the palm of his hand. “It’s not just me?”

He doesn’t know what’s going on, and so, he stays immobile. He hunches his shoulders, but that doesn’t hide him. It doesn’t make him any smaller, anymore.

“You’re shy, but that’s okay. Strict home? Me too. So many rules, ‘Keeu, don’t stay out after midnight! Keeu, did I see you with a boy? Keeu, what are you doing with your life, why didn’t you answer the twenty-thousand holocoms I sent this afternoon?’ But the thing is, we’re out now. They’re not gonna see. We can do what-e-ver we want,” she says, rolling the last syllables in her mouth. Her eyes gleam.

Savage looks at the table, trying to find a pattern in the paper and blossom shreds that cover it still, while he tries to think of a response. While he tries not to notice the hands that touch him. He flexes his hands and feels the nails against his palms, and he’s so preoccupied he only notices the bartender next to the table when she uses her loud voice.

“Is this man troubling you?” she says to Keeu, and her eyes dart down to Savage’s massive fists, and then to the small hands next to his.

“I—”

“No,” Keeu says. “We’re just getting to know each other. Thanks for looking out, though!”

The bartender walks off again, and Savage wants to call her back. He doesn’t. He doesn’t know why, for a moment, he thought she might help him. _(He is strong, was made to be strong, and the strong don’t need help.)_

He isn’t on Dathomir anymore, he reminds himself. He’s never going back. Never ever, because _Maul’s_ never going back. The Mother is far away. He swallows. “No, I don’t want—”

“C’mon, don’t be nervous. It’s a natural urge. We all feel it, and I don’t judge.”

He opens his mouth again, but he doesn’t get past the first syllable, “I—,” before She puts Her tongue into it. It hurts less than he thought it would, piecing together information from rumors and the survivors’ drunken ramblings as a child. It’s wet, and it feels like it should choke him, but it doesn’t. It doesn’t cut off the air from the nose, after all. He wishes it did.

She breaks off the kiss, and then Her fingers run gently down his cheek. “Inexperienced, huh?” She says. “Don’t worry, like I said, I don’t judge. There’s no shame in it. We all start somewhere.”

The fingers are ashen and white, now, and then they are green again but it doesn’t matter. They crackle with a power he’ll never know. Remember your place, they say.

And remember it, he does.

+

Keeu leads him to Her flat, a five-minute walk from the bar. Her fingers are tangled playfully in his own, pulling him up whenever his dragging feet manage to find an uncrushed beer can or a cobblestone to stumble over.

They’re pulling him up.

Up the stairs.

Up onto the bed, climbing above him with frightful purpose and Her dress pulled off.

She puts Her tongue in his mouth again, and the air tastes of flowers so strongly he wants to gag. He doesn’t, but She stops anyway and touches his face. His horns. Then, She moves his arms around and pushes the shirt away from his shoulders, and Savage can’t help but feel a terrible sense of relief. This moment has been waiting for him ever since he learned what a nightbrother is. _This was always going to happen._

There may have been a moment when he could have stopped it, back at the bar, if he’d been stronger and better at saying no, if he’d asked for help, but they’re here now. It’s too late. It’s been too late for years.

Savage’s notices that his hands are trembling, and they need to stop. This isn’t danger. This is his purpose. He is a nightbrother: He was bred for nothing but this. He is a body—mutilated into a pillar of muscle, he is nothing else—he is a link in the long chain of life on Dathomir, to be chosen by a Sister if he’s strong and killed if he isn’t. He cannot show Her that he is weak.

He just _can’t_.

He needs to get out, get back alive, get back to his brother, and he will never see him again if She sees his abject fear. Because nightbrothers do come back sometimes from their trials, callous ones and kind ones and small ones and tall ones without rhyme or reason, limping home from the Sisters and falling into drink, and Savage has always wondered at the Elders calling their return a kindness. Calling their own survival merciful, when they have grown hard and cruel for it. Now, he knows it is, and he would beg if he still had the words. He would beg, _I haven’t even taught Maul any songs yet._

Savage’s hands shake, and there is nowhere to put them but the smooth sweaty thighs above him.

“I like what you’re hiding under your layers,” Keeu says, grinning, trailing a delicate scaly finger across Savage’s pectoral muscles. “I like a man who works out. And those tattoos…”

 _This isn’t my body,_ Savage almost replies. _You made me this way._ He bites his tongue instead, hard enough to taste copper: The Sisters don’t tolerate insolence. No-one else will, either.

She wraps Her fingers around the glowing amulet dangling from Savage’s neck and looks at him, questioning, wondering whether She should take if off.

He hesitates. ( _Why is he afforded_ this _choice_ —)

Shakes his head.

In Her mercy, She leaves this last reminder of who Savage is alive for resting against his chest, his last sign to stay still and be strong and endure. He feels the weight of it against his ribcage when the Woman disappears into the ensuite bathroom and when She gets rid of his pants. It’s there when She pulls his limp dick out and when She strokes it until it grows achingly heavy, and when She stretches plastic over it. He feels it more than the words She uses to compliment his girth.

He keeps on feeling its familiar weight, even when the wet slide of Her body threatens to take him out.

 _Maul_ , the amulet says.

It leads him to another thought, _Maul doesn’t like rancor meat_ , and it is a better thought than any thought that could be aroused by his current situation. He clings to it. _Maul doesn’t like it raw_ —well, he doesn’t like any raw meat, his sense of taste having been as irreparably damaged by his master as the rest of him—but he doesn’t like it well done either. It is a genuine problem, not just because it is a cheap staple meal… Outside of Dathomir, it turns out it it’s neither common not particularly cheap, anyway.

But rancor is Savage’s favorite, and he hasn’t dared serve it for a month now.

_(The forests had been empty again in the week that Savage was handed another fresh-born baby, with scraps of placenta still sticking to the soft little head and to the rag he was swaddled in. The forests had been empty of everything but the apex predator, and so the Elders repeated their mantra, the way that Elders do. “Eat up, there is nothing else today. Are you weaklings?” they said, laughing at the children who were spitting out the bitter-tasting flesh, “Only the strongest dare to eat the rancor.”_

_It was in that moment that Savage decided rancor would be his favorite food. He was going to be strong, and he was never going to come home again and find an empty bed, and the apologetic face of Brother Viscus.)_

There is a tongue in Savage’s mouth again, lightly tracing the back seams of his teeth and then squirming against Savage’s tongue, like the bitten-off tail end of a massive earthworm, only much less delightful— _and Maul doesn’t like rancor flavored with kur-seeds and peppers._ He made the most entertaining face on tasting that dish for the first time, and when he stumbled on his unsteady new leg to the fresher to spit it out, Savage only started to feel bad for laughing when he didn’t come out for half an hour. He was too entertained to even think about his failure then, even though he cooked it, the meal he’s come to think of as the most comforting comfort food, in the doomed hope that it would help Maul feel better and stronger after his injury.

It feels wrong to mock him, now that he’s had a while to think it over. Maul’s soft palate is the fault of the human who raised him. Besides, Savage should be grateful: There is something soft left in his brother. Every time Maul hates the meals that Savage lovingly prepares for him, he should be glowing with pride and relief, because there is something Maul doesn’t like, and he’s learned to tell Savage about it.

Savage doesn’t know what it was that he did, but that doesn’t make it any less his greatest triumph: The first day that Maul looked at him, still tied up and after a month of stoically forcing down whatever Savage held up to his mouth, and spat the spiced chew-fish back in his face.

“This tastes like shit,” Maul said, then.

It’s one of Savage’s happiest memories, and it’s not like Maul is really _wrong_ about the taste of rancor, anyway.

 _(“Again?” Feral complained on his fifth fetch-day, and Savage’s tongue wrinkled in sympathy. Rancor stew had been Savage’s favorite for five years by then, but it would take yet another year until he actually_ liked _it.)_

It’s unkind to mock him, but still, Savage pictures his brother’s face, scrunched up with disgust, and still, he snickers.

“Oh… You like that,” the Woman above him pants.

Savage flinches.

He’s… lucky. It’s a tiny movement, and She takes it for an arrhythmic thrust. She leans down and kisses him. Yes, he’s lucky, probably. She didn’t notice; for once, Savage’s body did not betray him. She took it for an invitation, and it made her keep going, even if he didn’t mean, even if he didn’t want anything to—

So his body—

He stops thinking before he confuses himself further.

+

“Do you smell that?” Keeu asks sometime later, when they have stopped moving and Her breath is slow and cool against his neck.

Savage blinks up at Her. He doesn’t smell anything, or at least not anything he thinks She would consider remarkable. The only thing in the air is Her perfume. It’s everywhere now, spread by their movement in a way Maul would tell him doesn’t make sense scientifically, and the cruel lilac is clinging to every inch of Savage’s skin.

“There’s… burning. I think. Yes, that’s what it is, I recognize—something’s on fire. That’s wood. Wood smoke. There’s always been shitty wiring here, I’ve been complaining… The building’s on fire, I don’t know why there hasn’t been an alarm yet—we need to get out. What is—no. Not that, no! _Shit._ ”

Savage doesn’t move while She scrambles off him. His body is too heavy for that. There’s the sound of a door slammed shut and the click of a lock, but he doesn’t open his eyes yet. But then—

“Apprentice,” Maul says.

He’s standing in the bedroom doorway—the remains of it, anyway, most of the door’s still hanging on its hinges but there’s a smoldering hole where the locking mechanism used to be. With the bright eyes and the grimace on his face, he looks more real than the furniture that surrounds them. He looks the way the old, old tales of Wrath Returning from the Moons Unscathed and Triumphant sound. He looks like he’s come to bring Savage _home_.

Maul has his saberstaff raised and lit up, both sides, and his chest is heaving slightly, as if he’s been running. He isn’t wearing his cloak. Savage catches flashes of feeling, the way he’s never managed before: Maul is angry _(worried, terrified, understanding, relieved)_ —very angry.

“Come, apprentice,” he commands.

Maul’s eyes linger too long on Savage’s splattered body for it to mean anything but _pity_.

+

_(Keeu won’t completely stop bringing people home, but she’ll be careful for a long while, until the memory fades into a strange scary anecdote to bring up when she’s out drinking with her friends. She will be paranoid around thugs and screening them for the possibility of weird possessive brothers for years to come, though._

_She will never quite understand the difference between the appearance of physical strength and actual power. Between acceptance and choice. She will never understand what she did.)_

+

“We’re leaving,” Maul says flatly when they reach the ship.

Savage waits for him to elaborate—Maul usually tells him who they’re working for, now, and talks him through what could go wrong, so Savage doesn’t get worried or screw up—and when nothing happens, when they just climb inside and walk to the sleep-room and Maul disappears again, into the cockpit to start the engines, he wonders, _Did they have a client lined up? Is that why Maul went looking for him?_ It must be. He was gone for a mere hours, and Maul can be impatient, but Savage had been sure that this was one of those times when Maul wants to be on his own for a while.

Besides, he wasn’t gone for half as long as any honored nightbrother before him. Not long enough for the worry to set in. He would have gone back, soon. He was good. He’d have come back, he’s almost certain.

There must be a client, and Savage must have forgotten about them. It happens. It didn’t used to happen often, back when he was still following the amulet, but then, there was the thrill of possibly finding his brother. They’re boring, the hit jobs Maul prefers, and chosen for their deaths’ galactic significance through a kind of arcane and tangled logic he can’t even pretend to understand.

He’s still standing in the middle of the room, trying to remember the next job, when Maul comes back.

He’s still standing there when Maul finishes pulling off his shirts and when he gently arranges his boots and pants on a seat in the corner. He’s motionless when Maul sits down on the floor, legs crossed with his feet contorted onto his knees, and he’s stiffly upright like the pillar of a hut abandoned a quarter-way through construction, when Maul’s finished stretching his shoulders and arms. When Maul should be starting his evening meditation.

Savage should already be in bed, in the bed he’s irrationally refusing to look at even though it's still the same bed it was yesterday. He should be falling asleep, because Maul doesn’t order him—doesn’t even _allow_ him—to join in with meditation, anymore.

_(Words rippling into the heavy murk of his ears, “Stop, apprentice, just—” A hand softly placed on Savage’s cheek, and then a strong push, and much flailing. Uprighting himself as fast as possible, and an attempt at a serious face._

_Maul’s incredulous, stop-start laughter. “There’s no point in pretending, this time. You were_ snoring _.”)_

Instead of meditating, though, Maul stands up again. He looks at Savage for a long second, paces, picks up the blanket from Savage’s bed, and then he sits down in the corner of his floor-nest. He pushes the mismatched pillow-wall on the other side further away with a few kicks. Then he orders, “Come here.”

Savage does.

“Sit down,” Maul says.

Savage does, carefully, stepping over the pillow-wall. When he sits, the floor is cool through Maul's blankets, and hard as well. He scowls. He’s been telling Maul that it can’t be comfortable for a while now, but he’s always been informed that it’s adequate. For lack of actual knowledge—maybe the thick fabric he’d forced on Maul was enough, even if it didn’t seem like it—he believed him. Now, though...

“This isn’t good for your back. You need a proper bed.”

“A mattress is superfluous,” Maul says.

“You refused to have a blanket for two months,” Savage reminds him. “And now look at your nest…” He runs his hand over the wall of pillows to his left, still standing sturdy despite Maul’s show of carelessness in pushing it aside. “See? You can change.”

 _You can grow to like beds_ , Savage almost says, but the words bite into his throat and refuse to come out.

He pats the floor blanket again, instead.

“You’re deflecting,” Maul says, mercilessly. “I felt your terror. What happened?”

“I—” Savage frowns. It’s not the question he was expecting.

_(Was he expecting a question, instead of quiet admiration and scorn and a lifetime supply of the strongest alcohol they don’t have on the ship—)_

“I don’t want… I tried to—”

“There is no need to lie to me. I know. I felt your terror. I am your Master, and you were projecting it.”

“I—She talked to me, in the bar you left me in. I thought She was just friendly. I’ve talked to many people, this has never happened before.” Suddenly it’s very important that Maul understands this, at least. Savage wasn’t being naïve, staying in that bar or accepting a conversation. He had no reason to expect what would happen. This— _this natural act, his purpose as a nightbrother_ —this was not his doing.

Maul doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t look away from Savage’s face either, the way he usually does when his conversation partner grows emotional. Savage wonders whether he can ask for it, whether it would make the explanation easier, but… probably not.

There is no reason why Maul’s face would change the facts.

It’s just—there have never been any question before, when every child knows what it means to be chosen by a Sister. It is a fact of the world. It is the truest of honors. It’s something stuttered out by nervous big brothers who don’t want to leave the task of explaining why they aren’t coming back to the labored, shame-faced duty of Brother Viscus. _(It’s told early to the very young, so that it can be digested and integrated into their mind—so the Sisters can have their strong mates, can have what they are looking for, a creature who has cried out all his tears in his brothers’ arms years before, until he is completely dry when the Sister takes him.)_

Savage cannot think back far enough to reach a world empty of this truth, but he remembers too that Maul wasn’t raised a nightbrother _(for the blink of a second and for the first time, it feels like a mercy)_ , and so the words will have to stumble out.

“Brother, what do you know of Dathomir?”

“Your home. My origin. My— _mother_ ,” Maul replies. Backtracks, “It’s a remote planet in the Quelli sector, lit red by its sun. The sentient population are mainly thought to be a zabrakian subspecies. Although there is debate on that matter in the scientific community, owing to the general isolation of the planet—also from speciologists—and the strongly apparent sexual dimorphism. While all males phenotypically resemble the widespread, older Iridonian subspecies of zabraks, the females do not—”

_(Savage is caught, for a moment, by the thought of the Mother with a nightbrother’s face. It shakes him. How would he know who to trust, and who to serve?)_

“—possibly because of darkside magic, or simple weird genetics. There might be other causes, no-one has seriously studied Dathomir yet. Too remote. This doesn’t explain anything.”

Savage nods. It probably doesn’t, for an outsider. “She—wanted to breed me. Sleep with me. That’s what they do.”

“I gathered that from your physical state. That wasn’t my question, brother. I _know_ what happened to you.” Maul’s eyes are very soft. Maybe it’s easier that he isn’t looking away, after all. “I know you didn’t want it.”

 _I know you didn’t want it_ , and that doesn’t matter and has never mattered and it’s the only thing he can think now. _He didn’t want it._

“I asked because I wanted to understand why you didn’t fight back,” Maul says.

Savage swallows. Grabs at his thoughts. There has to be an explanation, something beyond the fact that he was at the bar, and then suddenly he wasn’t. He tries to remember the Woman’s face. He finds it gone.

He isn’t entirely sure what he was thinking back there, anymore. Why he obeyed. _He didn’t want it._ They can’t have been good thoughts, sensible thoughts, if they’re not there any longer. If Maul can’t understand them. There must have been thoughts, but there were also leaps of logic in his reasoning, old implicit truths that Savage will take weeks excavating from his brain, if Maul decides to question him further. Maybe those truths are wrong.

Maybe they’re not.

_(“No! Brother! Brother, please!”)_

Suddenly, he is tired down to the soft marrow of his bones.

“I tried to say no, but She didn’t listen. They never do. It’s their right. I tried to say no, but I couldn’t. If I could have—if it was possible for me to disobey, I would have, brother, believe me, please. I wouldn’t have…” Savage bites his lip so hard it bleeds. He wants the words to stop, because if Maul knew what Savage is capable of, the very crime that Maul stopped himself from committing—when Maul finds out what Savage has done, he could leave. It would be his right.

(It would be good, because Maul has to _live_.)

He could leave, but it’s his right to know, too, and maybe he will believe Savage. Maul is strong. He is wise. He will see: _Savage is_ incapable _of saying no_ , because if he could have stopped himself, and he still obeyed Her command…

“I wouldn’t have murdered our little brother when She ordered me to, if I was stronger. If I had my own will. I _cannot_ disobey.”

Maul blinks.

“I killed Feral. I killed our brother. I don’t know why I did it, but Mother Talzin ordered me, and I killed him. She changed—there’s something wrong with me. I would have died for him. I will die for you. But I didn’t. There’s something wrong with me. She took my will, and then She made me kill Feral, and I _did_ —” Savage chokes on his tongue. He wishes he was crying, but he just forgot to breathe in his desperation to puke the words out.

“My will is gone. Do you understand?” Savage asks. Begs, really, though to his ears it sounds like he’s managed to suppress the whining tone, which is—should be—good, because he should want Maul to ask questions. The nightbrothers are his culture, by right of birth if not in practice. _Feral was his brother too_. Savage wants Maul to know where it is he came from. He wants him to stop sounding like he’s reading from a reference book. He wants him to soothe the fear that Savage’s carried for his whole life. He wants Maul to know he is safe here above all else, and he wants him to understand that Savage didn’t have a choice in murdering their brother, that he never had a choice, and never will.

He wants impossible things.

He wants _to want_ to explain, but truly, he just wants him to understand, now, and he wants Maul not to judge him, because to Maul the justification might sound frail, and the confession horrific, and he might have looked weak, lying on that bed and so, so grateful to see his brother’s face, but—he wasn’t weak. He isn’t a monster. He thinks. (Maybe the Women just revealed the bare lack of strength that’s all that Savage is capable of.)

He wants to say all of this, but the words are gone.

“I do understand,” Maul declares finally.

Savage flinches. There’s too much sympathy in Maul’s voice; it’s much worse than rejection. He never should have wished for his brother’s understanding.

“It makes sense. What use is a tool that you cannot control entirely? She demanded your obedience, and then she tested it. You passed the test, and you were hers. You were _used_. You were raised to be used, and you were kept ignorant of the true range of your options.” Maul hasn’t looked away once. The reflected light in his eyes is the window-fire of a distant village in a thunderstorm. “Today, you were reminded of your powerlessness, and it froze you, but… You failed to use your emotions, brother. To master your fear. The weak are paralyzed by it, but that needn’t be you, ever again. You felt strongly enough to be truly powerful, then and today, to protect yourself and your family, but you still don’t understand how yet.”

With a nonchalant gesture, he signals for Cutlass II to switch off the lights in the sleeping room, and then himself.

“I will teach you how.”

Then, he leans closer and says, “ _Peace is a lie. There is only passion_ ,” words that he’s already told Savage early on, just months after they met again. He is as solemn now as he was the first time, his eyes shining intent and warm at Savage, as if he was bestowing a gift. He probably believes he is. “It is useless to deny your emotions. They exist. They are your ultimate strength. They are you. They are the last thing that will be left of you, when you cannot feel your body for pain and all conscious thought is torn from you. When you are but a _thing_ that _feels_.

“I cannot show you the truth of this in the way Lord Sidious did for me.”

His eyes flicker up towards a spot above Savage’s shoulder, and he shudders almost imperceptibly, but Savage is close enough to feel the vibrations. There’s no need for anything more—Savage, too, remembers the strangulation, and his little brother’s breakdown. He remembers the hatred he felt for Maul’s master then, the revulsion he still feels.

The contempt.

The certainty that this miserable, measly lesson couldn’t—that no lesson, nothing, _ever_ , could weigh up the strangling of a child. Of his helpless little brother. It might have made Maul’s pathetic old man of a master feel tall _(the Sisters might have ordered Savage to do it)_ but there is nothing more _cowardly_.

Besides, the lesson was a waste. Savage already knew that at a moment’s notice, his life could be torn away by the whim of his betters. Feral is dead. His new body is a shambling, foreign thing. He knows _nothing_ but this. He didn’t need to be taught again.

He doesn’t voice the thought, and Maul keeps on talking.

“Forgive me, brother, I can’t. But you are smart—you can gain the power of the Sith, too, despite this. You need only understand. You feel pain: you are here. You are not dead yet, and there is always something you can do. As long as there is breath in you, there is fight. You feel hate: they shall _not_ be here, soon. You feel fear: you want to change your situation.”

Savage tastes more than hears the command that follows, “Concentrate on what you felt back there, brother. Feel the full pressure of your terror. Draw the force to you.”

He doesn’t bother to remember fear. It has always been there, and it will never give him anything but gridlock. Instead, when he puts himself back into Her room, he goes where he went then. Once more, he thinks of the lofty disgust that is his reward for cooking and the rancor stew he’ll never taste again. Endless training. A solemn child who will possibly never understand that Savage is just trying to protect him.

 _You feel love: the only thing that matters is that Maul is safe_.

It’s nothing at all like what he knows he was supposed to do. It’s exactly as faithful as remembering his terror.

Maul grins and adds, “See? You feel, and yet you are full of power. It need not paralyze you. It can help. In every emotion, there is your strength. Your fuel. There is a path out of your situation if you listen, in everything you feel. _Through passion I gain strength_. Do you understand? _Through strength I gain power._ The weak accept what they must, but you’re strong, brother. You didn’t need to obey that woman. You are strong enough that you could have crushed her head between your hands, if only you had realized it.”

_Savage should have fought back—must fight back—because his brother still needs him. He failed Feral, but he doesn’t have to fail Maul, too._

_He should have been able to fight._

Maul puts his hand against Savage’s cheek and pushes up the head that Savage must have dropped, sometime during his exegesis, not in deference but in… something. Dumb half-comprehension. Shame. Savage can barely feel the fingertips against his skin. Maul’s touch, light and gentle, belies his words: Why would he be this careful, if he thought that Savage was strong?

“ _Through power I gain victory_.” Maul stares at Savage while he mouths the words reverently. “The weak live their squirming lives all around us in what they believe is safety, but they can only be ignorant of destiny for so long. The strong shall rise. The _Sith_ shall rise. Lord Sidious has already set his plan in motion and he has… discarded us. But we are strong. We are Sith, brother. We shall rise. _Through victory my chains are broken_. _The force shall free me_.”

Savage laughs. It rings harshly into the dark cozy space, and he didn’t mean to, but… “The force didn’t free you, brother.”

A growl. “Apprentice—”

“ _I did_. If I hadn’t found you, you’d still be cowering before the monster that stole—”

“Stop.” To add further emphasis, Maul grabs Savage’s face again, wraps his left hand around the lower half of his face this time. The mouth is gagged. The claws dig in. Savage’s sentence crumbles before the force of this superior argument. “Lord Sidious made me _strong_. You do not know what you are talking about, apprentice, and therefore I shall be merciful. But I will not tolerate your insolence much longer. Remember your place.”

It’s difficult to nod through his grip, but Savage thinks he manages it.

Maul lets go.

 _Nothing has changed,_ Savage realizes. _He agreed with Maul, and he still despises Sidious. Nothing changed._ A nod doesn’t actually _mean_ anything, no matter what Maul or the Elders or the Sisters or everyone else with a claim on his obedience may believe. His agreement has nothing to do with whether he believes them. Obedient actions are just the moving of muscle and sinew and bone. And beating Savage in an argument doesn’t mean—will never mean—that what they say is truth.

They can force him to destroy his world, but they cannot make him think.

Still, obeying Maul’s authority soothes the throng of inarticulate feelings in his brain. It reminds him of the times that his big brother talked him through fever dreams, before Carve left him behind and was bred and never returned. It is how Feral must have felt when Savage hid him behind his back, when he told him not to draw attention to himself in that arena, for all the lack of good it did in the end.

He nods again.

“Good. You can stay here tonight,” Maul says. “I don’t care.”

+

Savage wakes up only once during the course of the night. He stumbles back into his body from the harsh familiar forests of his home, and where there was the warm pressure of Feral’s fingers in his left hand, there is only tingling static, now. His arm is as dizzy as his head.

There is a stinging sort of pain in his belly and something heavy on top of him, and while he was asleep, the ceiling must have shifted and warped. The alloy is the Sheathipede’s familiar shade, but the contours, the always-there shapes that he has stared at for years now, for the long three years since he left his home, while he tried to fall asleep—the contours, they are wrong now. The screws are not where they were yesterday. The bed under him is harder than it is supposed to be.

He is confused, until he suddenly isn’t, and yesterday comes back to him as heavy and quick as a mudslide.

 _It_ happened.

Duty, only it wasn’t, he was misled and paralyzed by his own mind and forgot the Sisters are parsecs away, and maybe that’s why sex was much less painful than the few returning brothers had always made it sound. Maybe that’s why it felt worse. But it happened, and it was his own fault, and he’d be terrified by the betrayal of his brain and the new intimate knowledge of his reproductive purpose, only he also knows now: It will never happen again.

He isn’t a nightbrother anymore.

He is a Sith, whatever that might entail, and his duty isn’t to raise his kin, not any longer—although that won’t stop him from trying—and his duty isn’t the propagation of Dathomir. It’s not the word of the Mother.

His brother has pledged Savage to a code he doesn’t understand, handed down by a monster he despises.

He remembers, too, that it isn’t the ceiling that’s wrong. It’s just his place on this ship, in the world, that has changed. Savage was weak last night— _weaker than anyone has ever been,_ he thinks, _who was left to survive it—_ and Maul allowed him to hide.

Maul, who’s moved sometime during the night, shifting close in search for body heat or companionship or one of the blankets that Savage must have stolen in his sleep and then pushed off the other side of the nest. Or, more likely, in search for a pillow—right now, Maul’s head is resting on Savage’s stomach. His face is turned towards Savage’s own, and his slightly open mouth gradually feeds the puddle of drool and blood that’s collected on Savage’s belly.

Every time Savage breathes in, he feels a sharp sting, and he can see why now.

There’s a deep bleeding gouge where Maul’s small temple horn digs into the soft flesh.

Savage’s own horns have been blunted for decades, inspected for danger every week and filed down carefully, ever since the day when he was given his first baby and held him up to his face. It’s not that Maul had cried at the cuts to his grabbing hands, not really. He was a good baby. He just went very quiet, until he saw Savage’s shock, and even then, he only wailed for a minute. Still, it was enough. His hands were so soft and curious and vulnerable. The idea of hurting him, of losing this thoughtless trust, was too big to fit into Savage’s brain even then.

It shouldn’t have been surprising that Maul’s made the opposite choice, that his horns are filed to discreet but razor-sharp points. Just as Savage has grown into his purpose as his younger brothers’ living jungle gym, there is no cell in Maul’s body that has not been honed into a weapon.

For a small second, he considers wedging a pillow beneath his brother’s head. Discards the thought just as quickly. Maul wouldn’t appreciate being woken up. (Maul wouldn’t stay this close, if he knew he was doing it.)

So Savage just closes his eyes again.

He keeps still, and keeps breathing, and lets the pain and the soothing copper smell of his own blood chase off the last clinging traces of lilac perfume.

**Author's Note:**

> If you want to skip the rape scene, search for “We’re leaving,” Maul says flatly when they reach the ship. as soon as the character Keeu shows up (if you want to skip the lead-up too) or at the next section-break.
> 
> If you don’t want to read the aftermath either, that’s the whole end of the fic. Savage doesn't think of what's happened to him as rape and is trying to reconcile what he’s been taught (no nightbrother has a choice, this is the way the world works and the Nightsisters’ rule is right, and this shouldn’t be different) with just how bad he feels. There’s some accidental, very slight implicit victim-blaming, not because Maul doesn’t accept Savage but because Sith ideology is meritocratic and the flip-side of “You can be powerful enough that you can fight off the people who’ll hurt you.” which is what he tells Savage, is “If you had tried harder to be powerful, you wouldn’t have been hurt.” Neither of them reads Maul’s words this way but this is an implication I hate so I thought I’d point it out.
> 
> It’s mostly character stuff you’ll be missing and not plot-relevant _events_ , apart from the fact that Savage finally tells Maul that he was forced to murder Feral. Maul also talks to Savage about the Sith code (because that’s what he had to soothe himself with, and he’s trying to help in the only way he knows how), and Savage decides he is a Sith now while proving with his thought process he isn’t actually one.
> 
> \---
> 
> I’ve spent too many months with this fic to still be able to tell whether it’s okay or utter shit, but I hope you enjoyed it!! In my defense, this is the longest one-shot I’ve ever done and _way_ out of my comfort zone
> 
> The title’s from a Mountain Goats song
> 
> I probably wouldn't have continued this series without leftofrevolution pointing out that Qui-Gon never getting killed will change things in a comment! That will come up, but later. In the next part we're going to catch up with Maul's POV too
> 
> Thank you so much for reading!!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Buddies](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15073787) by [UnderCoverMarsupial](https://archiveofourown.org/users/UnderCoverMarsupial/pseuds/UnderCoverMarsupial)




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